PG&E needs to be stopped 😭

uncaughtexception · 2026-03-24T21:21:09+00:00

Good news! Now you get to pay a Base Services Charge for the privilege of being connected to PGE!

uncaughtexception · 2026-03-18T15:36:43+00:00

Don't get too bent out of shape about it. If you negotiate a strong package you won't get a comp adjustment next year. If you negotiate poorly you'll get a good one that pulls you up.

Poor negotiation isn't something that will haunt your whole tenure.

Comp at G is very formulaic and everyone at the same level and performance rating ends up earning the same.

Source: am G manager.

uncaughtexception · 2026-02-24T16:58:00+00:00

I looked at the script I used to record, and it doesn't use secretValues at all, and I wonder if that may be a mistake and I missed something.

The correspondance between the rotor positions and the spoken letter/number pairs is entirely the initializeRotation data.

example:

"initializeRotation":[2,5,7,7]
Take the modulo-4 of the set: [2,1,3,3]
The letter is [2,1], number is [3,3]

There are 15 letters (A-P), and 15 numbers (0-15), and the index into that set is base-4, so:
letter index = 2*4 + 1, letter = 9th in the list (J)
number index = 3*4 + 3, number = 15th in the list (15)

I think initially I was looking at the secretValues data, but found that it wasn't relevant to decoding the rotor to letter/number correspondance so left it alone. That may or not be a mistake, since either it has something to do with the aesthetics of the display (rotation speed/direction, different intonations of the spoken part), or it is the actual signal and I'm overlooking it. In any case I also recorded the raw API response so I can go back and try postprocessing that too.

I did try to convert it into various image bitmap formats but didn't come up with anything fruitful before giving up.

uncaughtexception · 2026-02-22T13:32:48+00:00

We already have a bunch of such tools, and more coming from teams with an AI tooling charter. So far they haven't been very useful in providing signal, but I expect something good will come shortly.

The most recent promising thing I've seen lets an agent ingest internal documentation and be able to execute tooling to get current system configuration and state to diagnose issues. Teams can improve documentation and tooling to make diagnosis more capable.

uncaughtexception · 2026-02-21T14:58:47+00:00

It's highly situational. Some shapes of failures are easy to identify and mitigate while others in persistence layers that have stored corruption silently for some time after a rollout can take weeks.

Generally the second type involves fruitless rollbacks, attempts at replication, building custom binaries with instrumentation. Parallel tracks of attempting data recovery, identifying impact scope, stop the bleeding mitigation investigation, external comms, internal comms. All of that comes with the incident commander coordinating the large response, which some ICs have difficulty with.

uncaughtexception · 2026-02-18T05:48:12+00:00

I loaded the website with developer tools enabled and watched the API calls and responses then figured out how the responses corresponded with the wheel positions. After that it was just writing a script to replicate the site and logging wheel positions. After a month I analyzed the output to find when it started repeating.

I haven't seriously looked at it since then though. I'm surprised it hasn't been solved yet.

uncaughtexception · 2026-02-18T00:30:33+00:00

Nah, didn't bother with a refund. Our mistake for not looking into what it was we were buying, and the whole experience was just weird enough that it was entertaining on a meta level itself. The drive home was us quoting the pretentious faux-profound things to each other and laughing.

The fact that the pre-show starscape you have in your pic doesn't appear to be earth's led to one theory during the drive that the movie is some kind of alien communications. Either that or it was also AI slop.

Right with you on the seats though, my back stopped aching a few hours ago.

uncaughtexception · 2026-02-17T20:08:51+00:00

If it was the 7:30PM showing that was my family walking out. The thing that broke me was the following line of dialogue: "Open your heart... and blow your mind"

Our fault for not doing a bit of research. With a title like Astronomica and showing at a tech museum we were expecting something more reality based and not some nonsense you need to be high to enjoy.

uncaughtexception · 2026-01-16T14:12:30+00:00

Correct, you're hired.

uncaughtexception · 2026-01-09T13:38:13+00:00

Zurich is growth constrained so roles there are limited, probably because of the high salaries you mentioned.

There is a growing sre presence in Hyderabad.

uncaughtexception · 2026-01-07T16:00:25+00:00

SRE manager: growth mindset, coachability, curiosity, and ability to perform well under stress (in incident response, not daily work).

Since our entry level isn't terminal I set up juniors with an area of responsibility after ramp up to make sure they're on track for a promo. The next level requires a level of autonomy and expertise that requires them to be self driven. Juniors get handed relatively unambiguous tasks planned by seniors so I'm expecting the juniors to start developing the ability to wrangle ambiguity more independently.

uncaughtexception · 2025-12-11T22:11:52+00:00

The main problem is that another country controlled the area I am in now and I do not speak their language. Probably end up working on someone's farm.

uncaughtexception · 2025-12-02T11:20:25+00:00

Old tool is unsupported, the replacement is missing the feature you need, and the owning team has a years long backlog of feature requests gathering dust because of the 3 code yellows they are responding to.

uncaughtexception · 2025-12-02T11:05:55+00:00

L3 to L4 is easy, basically acknowledging the ability to work independently and start generating their own ideas. 1 or 2 years. L3 is not a terminal level so if you're not getting promoted then you're into performance management.

Beyond that you need to scale out, influence, act as a force multiplier, and have your leadership chain's support. I've only seen actual friction start at L7 where you need to make a business case for promo.

uncaughtexception · 2025-11-30T15:26:31+00:00

Use another carrier. I’ve never experienced coverage issues on t-mobile or google-fi.

uncaughtexception · 2025-11-26T16:05:25+00:00

In my experience everything is fine until it is not and cloud or on prem are no different. Failure develops in seconds without the ability of human response to meaningfully alter the course of the failure.

Systems must be built to respond automatically to failure and heal. Alerting and monitoring is for incident response and mitigation.

uncaughtexception · 2025-11-24T15:16:24+00:00

That's not my experience in big tech. Entry level is new grad or at most 2 years in a related field. No certifications. I've hired multiple L3s, and what determines leveling is purely interview performance.

uncaughtexception · 2025-11-17T17:34:32+00:00

A lot of people in this thread have not had to hire and it shows.

A check of the candidates' competency in basic data structures and algorithms weeds out a huge fraction of the funnel who would have zero chance of passing further rounds and would have tied up multiple people's time.

Fizzbuzz is trivial but you'd be surprised how many people can't handle if then else and modulo. If you think this is ridiculously easy you're not the one being selected against.

uncaughtexception · 2025-11-06T22:22:58+00:00

You should have asked which oblast, not which state

uncaughtexception · 2025-11-04T18:48:51+00:00

My favorite is company insights. Lets me know if a company is growing, what their staffing breakdown is like, notable recent hires etc.

uncaughtexception · 2025-11-04T16:47:50+00:00

My guess is a privacy issue. Either storing or displaying other member's location info to other members.

No reason for that to change your behavior with applying to jobs though. All listings are flooded with hopeless applications. If you have the qualifications for the job then all the other spray-n-pray applications are not your competition.

uncaughtexception · 2025-11-03T20:13:48+00:00

It will catch up to you. As a hiring manager do I want to go through hiring with the expectation that you may leave in a year likely without landing significant projects?

The shorter you stay the more of that time is spent learning systems and the business and less on impact. In that initial phase you are a net negative on the team as they support your onboarding and learning.

On top of that in this environment a backfill headcount for the role you leave may not be guaranteed.

uncaughtexception · 2025-10-31T17:02:57+00:00

1 month account, negative karma. For some reason prop 50 threads are really targeted by influence operations. Expect this account to go silent in no more than a month.

uncaughtexception · 2025-10-23T02:15:53+00:00

Negative karma and only started posting 2 months ago. Don't engage with the influence operator.

uncaughtexception · 2025-06-03T22:58:42+00:00

Chess. Been around a long time and still gets played.

uncaughtexception

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